The government of South Sudan on Friday denounced what it called a groundless report that accuses the president and other figures engaged in the country\u2019s civil war of fomenting violence in order to amass illegal wealth.<\/p>\n
The report, released on Monday by the Sentry, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to expose corruption in Africa, said that relatives and associates of President Salva Kiir, as well as his political rival, Riek Machar, a former vice president, had enriched themselves with impunity.<\/p>\n
It asserted that the leaders of both sides had stoked ethnic hatred and carried out atrocities, including systematic rape and killing, as a pretext for seizing more wealth in South Sudan, the world\u2019s youngest country.<\/p>\n
The authors of the report said the investigation took two years and was based on public information and documents provided by sources that required anonymity for safety reasons.<\/p>\n
The report concluded that the principal antagonists in South Sudan and their associates had \u201cbenefited financially from the continuing war and have effectively ensured that there is no accountability for their human rights violations and financial crimes.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a statement, Mr. Kiir\u2019s spokesman, Ateny Wek Ateny, questioned the motives of the report\u2019s authors, suggesting that the anonymity they provided to the sources in the report called into question whether \u201cthose sources really exist.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Ateny said he was \u201cshocked by the irresponsibility shown by the so-called investigators of this report.\u201d He said the report would aggravate the mutual distrust that had punctuated the conflict, which erupted nearly three years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cWould any Western leader accept to be accused in such a groundless way?\u201d Mr. Ateny said in the statement. \u201cWe will make sure that each of those allegations are challenged with a counter forensic and legal analysis of the shortcomings of this report.\u201d<\/p>\n
Representatives of Mr. Machar, whose whereabouts is unknown, have not responded to requests for comment about the report.<\/p>\n
Mr. Ateny\u2019s response came after the government took steps to limit access to the report\u2019s findings in South Sudan. On Wednesday, a South Sudanese newspaper, The Nation Mirror, which had published some of the findings of the Sentry report, was ordered closed indefinitely, Reuters reported.<\/p>\n
John Prendergast, a human-rights activist and former United States government official who founded the Sentry along with George Clooney, the activist actor, said Friday that he was not surprised at the South Sudan government\u2019s response. \u201cWe stand behind our report,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The South Sudan conflict has created a humanitarian crisis, uprooting more than two million civilians and leaving more than five million \u2014 roughly half the country\u2019s population \u2014 in need of food.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The government of South Sudan on Friday denounced what it called a groundless report that accuses the president and other figures engaged in the country\u2019s civil war of fomenting violence in order to amass illegal wealth. The report, released on Monday by the Sentry, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to expose corruption in Africa, said that relatives and associates… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions\/82"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}